Business services, such as banking, insurance, telecom or postal play a significant role in the day-to-day life of individuals. To access any of the services, customers must fill out two or more application forms, which generally vary depending on the type of service. For example, if the consumer wishes to open a new account with a bank, she has to fill out an account opening form, but if the customer wants to apply for a loan, he or she has to fill out the corresponding loan application form. In the current scenarios, a customer fills out an application form in front of a branch representative and then the completed application form is transferred to a back-office or head office. In the back-office, these forms are processed along with various other forms received from other branches and then stored in a database for later retrieval.
The customer usually fills out the form manually and an employee of the business process company enters that hand written information into a database at a back-office of the business process company. Concealing the identity of the consumer while processing a filled application form is of significant relevance to the business process handling industry, to comply with privacy regulations, and gain a reputation for the same. The employee entering the data can see and access responses to fields entered by the consumer, e.g. SSN, phone number address, and so forth from the filled forms. Some of these responses may identify the consumer when used individually, or in combination, such as name and phone number, and may reveal a significant amount of sensitive information about the consumer, which ideally should be kept confidential.
These days many companies that strictly adhere to regulations of confidentiality do handling of such forms by taking the employee of the institute entering the data into confidence. Another approach for solving this problem is to remove the description of the field (question) from the form automatically before it reaches the employee, i.e., by black marking the query, e.g., “Please enter your SSN” in the form. All these methods help only to a certain extent. The employee can however figure out that a 9-digit number is a social security number, a 10-digit number is a phone number, a given zip code translates to city ‘A’, and so on.
Thus, there exists a need for methods or systems to process the application forms including confidential data in a secure manner. Such methods and systems will give a client more confidence in putting consumer data into other companies' hands likewise the companies themselves can achieve a competitive advantage with better methods.